There are a wide range of instances where a group of individuals are coordinated for an event. Examples of such events can include, but are not limited to, birthday parties, weddings, christenings, funerals, school trips, concerts, business meetings, conferences, charity events, and reunions. Today, in order to set up such events a range of options exist with respect to communication tools including, for example, Simple Messaging Service (SMS), telephone, social media such as Facebook™, messaging services such as Twitter™, email, and web based services such as Google Events.
In the majority of instances these events are based at a particular location (e.g. an office, church, restaurant, concert hall, etc.) although in other instances these may be a range of locations (e.g. a charity run requiring volunteers at the start, finish and runner registration) and whilst typically over a generally small geographic area the multiple locations may be over an extended geographic area (e.g. Rio de Janeiro for the Summer Olympics). Accordingly, the number of helpers, volunteers, attendees, support staff, event staff may range from a few to hundreds to thousands. Within the prior art organizers of such events would exploit walkie-talkies which would be provided to specific volunteers to handle communications between them. Different channels upon a walkie-talkie can be selected so that multiple conversations can occur concurrently. However, these walkie-talkies must be handed out to those individuals/staff/volunteers deemed to need them, be passed on as shifts and personnel in roles change, and collected at the end of the day. Further, walkie-talkies have a set range and the bigger the range the more expensive the walkie-talkie.
Over the past few years with the increasing penetration and functionality of cellular telephones and so-called smartphones there have been several “push-to-talk” applications including, but not limited to, Voxer, iPTT, HeyTell, and Zello which provide users with basic walkie-talkie functionality such as one-to-one and one-to-group messaging. However, the other users must be contacts of the user and when a group is formed the members of a group must be known.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide individuals, enterprises, organizers, etc. with the ability to establish communications to individuals or group of individuals rapidly, with low complexity and management overhead, exploiting walkie-talkie style communications upon mobile devices connected to wireless networks over varying geographical areas without requiring distribution of walkie-talkies etc. as the mobile device is the user's own smartphone or cellphone. Further, it would be beneficial for such communications to be managed through a software application such that the user's virtual walkie-talkie automatically assigns channels etc. based upon the user's role, the event, their location etc.
Other aspects and features of the present invention will become apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon review of the following description of specific embodiments of the invention in conjunction with the accompanying figures.